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The Effect of Language On Economic Behavior
The Effect of Language On Economic Behavior
http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.103.2.690
Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the
hypothesis that the languages that grammatically associate the future
and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction
arises naturally when well-documented effects of language structure
are merged with models of intertemporal choice. Empirically, I
find that speakers of such languages: save more, retire with more
wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese. This
holds both across countries and within countries when comparing
demographically similar native households. The evidence does not
support the most obvious forms of common causation. I discuss
implications for theories of intertemporal choice. (JEL D14, D83,
E21, I12, J26, Z13)
* Yale University, 135 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511 (e-mail: keith.chen@gmail.com). I am indebted
to Judy Chevalier, Östen Dahl, Ashwini Deo, Bob Frank, Shane Frederick, Emir Kamenica, Mark Liberman, Elisa
Long, John McWhorter, Sharon Oster, Ben Polak, Geoffrey Pullum, Frances Woolley, an anonymous referee and
seminar participants at Berkeley, Boston University, Harvard, Penn Linguistics, Stanford Economics, Stanford
Linguistics, UCLA, UCSD, Wharton, Yale Economics, and Yale Linguistics, for generous feedback and sugges-
tions. Special thanks are due to Nicole Palffy-Muhoray, who provided extensive feedback on multiple drafts of this
paper, and to Jane Bang and Ryan Caro for their research assistance. All errors are my own. I have no relevant or
financial interests related to this project to disclose.
†
To view additional materials and author disclosure statement(s), visit the article page at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.103.2.690.
1
These are what linguists call periphrastic constructions, in which future events are marked by the addition of
auxiliary words.
2
In English, future reference is possible without future markers in certain contexts: specifically with scheduled
events or events resulting from law-like properties of the world. See Copley (2009) for details. In my analysis, I set
aside these cases because, as shown in Dahl (1985) and Dahl (2000, p. 311), “in many if not most languages, this
kind of sentence is treated in a way that does not mark it grammatically as having non-present time reference... even
for languages where future-time reference is otherwise highly grammaticalized.” In other words, how scheduled
events are treated does not reflect a language’s overall treatment of future reference.
690
VOL. 103 NO. 2 chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior 691
actions. This hypothesis arises naturally if grammatically separating the future and
the present leads speakers to disassociate the future from the present. This would
make the future feel more distant, and since saving involves current costs for future
rewards, would make saving harder. On the other hand, some languages grammati-
cally equate the present and future. Those speakers would be more willing to save
for a future which appears closer. Put another way, I ask whether a habit of speech
which disassociates the future from the present, can cause people to devalue future
rewards.
The bulk of this paper investigates whether this prediction is borne out in savings
behavior. To do so, I first review the literature on what linguists call future-time
reference (FTR), which studies both when and how languages require speakers
to mark the timing of events. From this literature I adopt a future-time criterion
from typological linguistics, which separates languages into two broad catego-
ries: weak and strong-FTR. This criterion separates those languages that require
future events to be grammatically marked when making predictions (strong-
FTR languages, like English), from those that do not (weak-FTR languages, like
German).3 By analyzing text samples extracted from the web, I confirm that this
linguistic distinction captures a central tendency of how languages mark future
events, and that this distinction can be both generated and verified in automati-
cally collected data.
I then examine how these linguistic differences correlate with future-oriented
behaviors such as saving, exercising, abstaining from smoking, condom use, retire-
ment savings, and long-run health. I also attempt to determine if differences in
language cause these differences in behavior, or if non-linguistic traits that are coin-
cident with language explain these correlations. For example, most (but not all)4
Germanic languages are weak-FTR: could there also be a “Germanic” savings value
that is widely held by Germanic-language speakers but not caused by language?
While not conclusive, the evidence does not support the most obvious forms of
common causation.
Cross-country regressions show a strong correlation between weak-FTR languages
and future-oriented behavior, which do not attenuate with the inclusion of numerous
geographic, cultural, and institutional controls. Switching to within-country regres-
sions, I compare individuals with identical income, education, family structure, and
countries of birth, but who speak different languages. These regressions rely for
identification on a set of nine multilingual countries with both weak- and strong-
FTR populations.5 In these regressions, speakers of weak-FTR languages (with
little to no grammatical distinction between the present and future) appear more
3
Specifically, I adopt a criteria which distinguishes between languages which Dahl (2000, p. 325) calls “future-
less,” and those which are not. Dahl defines “futureless” languages as those which do not require “the obligatory use
[of grammaticalized future-time reference] in (main clause) prediction-based contexts.” In this framework, a predic-
tion is a statement about the future that has no intentional component. Predicting the weather would be a canonical
example. See Dahl (2000) and Thieroff (2000) for a discussion of the basis and areal properties of this distinction.
In the text of this paper, I adopt Thieroff’s more neutral language of “weak-FTR” for “futureless” languages, and
denote non-weak-FTR languages as “strong-FTR.” See Section IIIA for details on the EUROTYP criteria developed
by Dahl (2000), Appendix B for a discussion of how I apply this criteria to languages not covered by EUROTYP,
and the online Appendix for a complete list of coded languages.
4
Interestingly, English is a notable outlier among Germanic languages. I discuss this at length in Section II.
5
These countries are Belgium, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Estonia, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria,
Malaysia, Singapore, and Switzerland.
692 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
Languages differ widely in both how and when they require speakers to signal that
they are talking about the future. For example, English primarily marks the future
with either “will” or forms of “be going to.” 6 In contrast, some languages mark
6
The English “will” is what linguists call a de-volitive future construction which descended from the Proto-
Germanic willan, or “want.” While “will” was already used for future-time reference in Old English, the mod-
ern German equivalent wollen, is not used for future-time reference in German. The English “be going to” is a
VOL. 103 NO. 2 chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior 693
future events using a much larger and diverse set of constructions. For example,
Bittner (2005) documents that Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), has at least 28 dis-
tinct constructions which mark future time:
More subtly, languages also differ in when they require speakers to specify the
timing of events, or when timing can be left unsaid. The linguist Roman Jakobson
explained this difference as: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey
and not in what they may convey” (Jakobson and Halle 1956).
For example, if I wanted to explain to an English-speaking colleague why I can’t
attend a meeting later today, I could not say “I go to a seminar.” English grammar
would oblige me to say “I (will go, am going, have to go) to a seminar.” If, on the
other hand, I were speaking Mandarin, it would be quite natural for me to omit any
ıˉn g ji aˇ ngzuò (I go listen seminar):
marker of future time and say W oˇ qù t
with no reference to future time, since the context leaves little room for
misunderstanding.7
In this way, English forces its speakers to habitually divide time between the pres-
ent and future in a way that Mandarin (which has no tenses) does not. Of course,
this does not mean that Mandarin speakers are unable (or even less able) to under-
stand the difference between the present and future, only that they are not required
to attend to it every time they speak. This difference, in the obligatory marking of
future events is a central characteristic of the weak- versus strong-FTR classification
(Thieroff 2000), and is the difference between languages I exploit in my study of
savings behaviors.
These differences between languages are surprisingly widespread, and occur not
only between neighboring countries in the same region, but sometimes occur within
multilingual countries. For example, European languages range from a tendency to
rarely distinguish present and future time (like Finnish) to languages like French,
which have separate and obligatory “future” forms of verbs.8 A Finnish speaker
de-andative construction that developed in the seventeenth century, and is found in English, Dutch, French, Spanish,
and Portuguese, but not in German. In English, neither construction is purely a tense marker, but instead mark
different temporal and modal properties which give rise to future-time reference in certain contexts (“going to” is
prospective aspect, while “will” can be a modal auxiliary).
7
In this and all subsequent examples, I follow the Leipzig glossing rules, where fut and prs indicate future and
present morphemes. See Croft (2003) for details.
8
Languages where verbs have distinct future forms are said to have an “inflectional” future. In Europe, this
includes the romance languages (except Romanian), and most Slavic and Semitic languages. See Dahl (1985)
for source data on inflectional futures in Europe, and Dahl and Velupillai (2011) for a broad survey of inflectional
futures around the world.
694 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
for example, would say both Tänään on kylmää (today is cold) and Huomenna on
kylmää (tomorrow is cold) using the unmarked verb on:
b. Huomenna on kylmää
Tomorrow be.prs cold
“It will be cold tomorrow”
while French speakers would switch from Il fait froid aujourd’hui (it is cold today),
to Il fera froid demain (it will-be cold tomorrow):
an English speaker would have to grammatically mark future time (it will rain
tomorrow, and it will be cold tomorrow).10 Later, I will exploit the fact that weak-
and strong-FTR languages often coexist within the native languages of the same
9
This observation that German and English differ dramatically in obligatory GFTM is not new: Comrie (1985)
cites English and German as exemplars of strong- and weak-FTR languages. For a detailed analysis of this differ-
ence between English and German see Copley (2009). Copley demonstrates that in English, “futurates” (sentences
about future events with no FTR) can only be used to convey information about planned/scheduled/habitual events,
or events which arise from law-like properties of the world. This restriction is not present in German, and futurates
are common in German speech and writing.
10
Thieroff (2000) documents what Dahl (2000) calls a “futureless area” in Northern and Central Europe, includ-
ing most Finno-Ugric and all Germanic languages except English.
VOL. 103 NO. 2 chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior 695
country, helping me isolate linguistic effects from confounds that vary on the coun-
try level (such as taxes, institutions, or capital markets).
(5) C < ∫ e−δ
t Rd F(t).
The first way that language may affect future choices is by changing how distant
future events feel. For example, it seems plausible that speaking about future events
as if they were happening now (in the present tense), would lead weak-FTR speak-
ers to perceive future events as less distant. Indeed, several literary and rhetorical
techniques appear to depend on this for their effectiveness.
For example, speakers often narrate past events in the present tense, with the goal
of making those events feel more vivid and immediate (linguists call this the histori-
cal present). Writers have consciously used this tense-shifting strategy since at least
the first century, when in what is often considered the first treatise on writing style,
Longinus wrote:
“If you introduce things which are past as present and now taking
place, you will make your story no longer a narration, but an actuality.”
(Longinus, On the Sublime, first-century AD)
For example, the historian Peter Rodman writes:
Common across languages and used in both writing and conversation, linguists have
traditionally thought that narrating the past in the present make a story more vivid
and immediate by “moving past events out of their original time frame and into the
moment of speaking” (Schiffrin 1981).
Indeed, this technique is widespread enough to elicit scorn from critics who con-
sider it manipulative. The Man Booker Prize judge Philip Hensher attributes the
routine use of the present tense to: “a thousand low-level creative writing tutors,
696 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
clinging to the belief that you can ‘make your writing more vivid’ by turning to the
present tense.” Author and critic Philip Pullman (while acknowledging skillful use
by Brontë and Dickens), agrees, complaining: “if every sound you emit is a scream,
a scream has no expressive value … I feel claustrophobic, always pressed up against
the immediate.”
Similarly, jokes are almost always told in the present tense, as in “a man walks
(not walked) into a bar.” This is often attributed to a need for immediacy and sur-
prise in successful humor. If talking about temporally distant events in the present
tense makes them seem more immediate, languages which force this way of speak-
ing may make future events seem closer.
A similar linguist construction flips this logic to arrive at the same effect. In what
some linguists call distancing, distant (past or future) tenses are used instead of the
present tense to convey that a current event is distant in some other way (Dancygier
and Sweetser 2009).11 For example, something that is distant from current reality
(unlikely or impossible), is often spoken about in the past tense, as in:
which conveys that the person does not have a car at present. Note that the past-tense
“had” is not meant to describe a past state, which would require an auxiliary “had.”
Iatridou (2000) notes that this use of the past tense to convey distance from reality
occurs in both wishes (like above) and also in if-clauses:
“If I had a car (I would give you a ride),” “If he ran the school… .”
These non-past uses of past tenses are widespread across languages (James 1982),
and while less common, future tenses are also used (Mezhevich 2008). If speaking
about current events in a distant tense makes them seem distant, languages which
oblige speakers to use a future (distant) tense may make future events seem more
distant.
In the context of my simple model, this could be represented either through the
discount rate, or through beliefs. That is, we could imagine that weak- and strong-
FTR languages lead speakers hold rates δW < δS , which would immediately trans-
late into different willingness to save:
(t) and
Alternatively, we could represent such an effect as shifting the beliefs FW
FS(t) that weak- and strong-FTR speakers hold. If weak-FTR speakers perceive the
11
This use of the simple past to convey epistemic distance is closely related to several well-studied linguis-
tic phenomena, including hypotheticals (see James 1982), counterfactuals (see Iatridou 2000), conditionals (see
Dancygier and Sweetser 2009), and most broadly, the irrealis and subjunctive moods.
VOL. 103 NO. 2 chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior 697
The second way that language may affect future choices is by leading speakers
to have more or less precise beliefs about the timing of future rewards. Languages
with more grammatical time marking would lead speakers to hold more precise
beliefs about the timing of events if either: marking time requires increased atten-
tion to time, or if these markers are encoded in memory. While no studies (to my
knowledge) have directly examined the effects of how a language treats time, a large
literature has found that language with more precise “basic color terms”12 cause
their speakers to hold more precise color beliefs.
Summarizing this literature, MacLaury et al. (1992) notes that languages around
the world possess anywhere from 2 to 11 basic color terms. So for example, while
almost all languages distinguish between black, white, and red, several languages
name all of yellow, green, and blue with one basic color term, and many languages
do not have a basic word for purple, pink, orange, or grey. In one of the first stud-
ies examining the cognitive correlates of these differences, Brown and Lenneberg
(1954) find that Zuñi speakers (who lack a lexical distinction between orange and
yellow) have trouble remembering nuanced differences between orange/yellow
colors.13
More recent studies have confirmed the direct role of language in these findings.
Russian makes an obligatory distinction between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue
(siniy). Winawer et al. (2007) finds that Russian speakers do better than English
speakers in distinguishing blues when the two colors span the goluboy/siniy border
(but not when then do not), and that these differences are eliminated when subjects
must simultaneously perform a verbal (but not a spatial) distractor task. Further
implicating language in this differential precision, Franklin et al. (2008) finds that
this difference holds for adults, but not for pre-linguistic infants.
If this linguistic-precision effect is also true for time perception, then strong-FTR
speakers will be less willing to save. To see this, assume strong-FTR speakers (who
must separate the future and present) hold more precise beliefs about the timing of
reward R than speakers of weak-FTR languages. More concretely, if F (t) and FS (t)
W
are the beliefs of weak-FTR and strong-FTR language speakers, then we might
expect FW (t) to be a mean-preserving spread of FS (t). Proposition 1 establishes that
a decision maker with beliefs FW (t) will value future rewards more than one who
holds beliefs FS (t).
Proposition 1: If FW (t) is a mean-preserving spread of FS (t), then ∫ e
−δt Rd FW (t)
−δt
> ∫ e
Rd FS (t).
12
MacLaury et al. (1992) defines “basic color terms” as: “the simplest forms of broadest meaning that most
speakers of a language will routinely apply to colors in any context.”
13
The Zuñi (one of the Pueblo peoples), are a Native American tribe that live primarily in western New Mexico.
698 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
Proof:
(t) is a mean-preserving spread of FS (t), then FS (t) second-order
Note that if FW
stochastically dominates F (t). Also note that for any discount rate δ > 0, e −δt
W is a
strictly-convex function. Therefore ∫ e −δt
Rd FW (t) > ∫ e −δt
Rd FS (t).
In other words, if more finely partitioning events in time leads to more precise
beliefs, weak-FTR speakers will be more willing to save than their strong-FTR
counterparts. Intuitively, since discounting implies that the value of future rewards
is a strictly-convex function of time, uncertainty about the timing of future payoffs
makes saving more attractive. Experimentally, Redelmeier and Heller (1993) find
this risk-seeking response to timing uncertainty, which is also commonly observed
in animal studies (see Kacelnik and Bateson 1996). Note that the exponential dis-
count function I specified in equation (5) is not critical: every widely studied theory
of discounting is strictly convex, and would produce the same result.14
This would have the same effect on savings as mechanism one: people who speak
weak-FTR languages (who speak the future and present identically) would save,
exercise, and plan more, and spend, smoke, and over-consume less. I will now pres-
ent a set of empirical findings which test this hypothesis, then return to a more gen-
eral discussion of language and cognition.
A. Coding Languages
14
See Frederick, Loewenstein, and O’Donoghue (2002) for a review of both models and evidence on discount-
ing behavior.
15
Future-time reference was a focal area of the EUROTYP Theme Group on Tense and Aspect, which studied
the typological and areal distribution of grammaticalized future-time reference. The idea for EUROTYP was devel-
oped at a European Science Foundation conference (Rome, January 1988). At those meetings, it was established
that a cross-linguistic study of the tense and aspect systems of European Languages would form one of EUROTYP’s
nine focus areas. The resulting working group summarized their findings in an 846 page volume on Tense and
Aspect, edited by Östen Dahl (2000).
VOL. 103 NO. 2 chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior 699
unmarked form (the present), in other words, in general the future is not obligatory.”
Dahl also finds that weak-FTR corresponds strongly with a language’s general ten-
dency to require FTR, and that “whether FTR is overtly and obligatorily marked in
prediction-based sentences can be used as one of the major criteria for whether it is
grammaticalized in a language or not” (Dahl 2000, p. 310). These analyses motivate
my decision to use weak-FTR as a proxy for the general treatment of future time in
a language.
Most regressions in this paper cover languages directly analyzed by the EUROTYP
Theme Group. In those regressions, strong-FTR languages are the exact complement
of what Dahl calls “futureless” and Thieroff (2000) calls “weakly-grammaticalized
future” languages. Some regressions analyze the World-Values Survey, whose
participants speak many non-European languages not analyzed by either Dahl or
Thieroff. To extend their characterization to this broader set, I rely on several other
cross-linguistic analyses, (most notably Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994; Cyffer,
Ebermann, and Ziegelmeyer 2009; Dahl 1985; Dahl and Kós-Dienes 1984; and
Nurse 2008), and on individual grammars for languages that are extensively spoken
in the WVS but not covered by these broader analyses. A more detailed discussion
of coding languages is found in Appendix B, and a large table of all languages
included in this study and their coding is included in the online Appendix.
B. Alternative Codings
While in this paper I focus for simplicity on weak- versus strong-FTR languages,
there are several related criteria that may be important. A weaker criterion might
be the presence of any grammatical marking of future events in a language, even
if infrequently used. This would include both inflectional markers (like the future-
indicating suffixes in Romance languages) or periphrastic markers (like the English
auxiliary “will.”) Mandarin, Finnish, and Estonian are examples of languages that
lack either type of future markers.16 A stronger criterion might be the presence of
an inflectional future tense, which would include most Romance languages, but
exclude English. These alternative criterion would satisfy
?
(8) Any Gr FTR ⊃ Weak FTR ⊃ Strong FTR ⊃ Inflectional FTR,
with the first and second inclusions being logically necessary, and the third repre-
senting a typological regularity for which I do not have a counterexample.17
For simplicity and transparency, in this paper I have adopted the main criterion
advocated by the EUROTYP working group for “futureless” languages, which
corresponds to the second inclusion. An additional reason for this choice is that,
as both Dahl and Thieroff note, in the EUROTYP data weak-FTR languages are
those in which “the future is not obligatory in sentences with future-time reference”
(Thieroff 2000, p. 288). Since this is the characteristic of languages (a more or less
16
Dahl (2000) writes that Finnish and Estonian stand out in Europe as “extreme examples of languages with
no systematic marking of future time reference (although this does not imply a total absence of devices that show
future time reference).”
17
More specifically, the languages which satisfy these criteria are nested sets. That is: {X | X has any grammati-
cal FTR} ⊃ {X | X has at least weak FTR} ⊃ {X | X has strong FTR} ⊃ {X | X has inflectional FTR}.
700 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
18
As a robustness check, it is possible to include all three inclusions as nested effects in the broader cross-coun-
try savings regressions in this paper. While these regressions do not have enough statistical power to disentangle
all three effects, results suggest increasingly strong effects as you move from weaker to stronger criteria, with joint
statistical significance similar to that of the binary weak-vs-strong distinction. Please see online Appendix Table 4
for the results of these regressions.
19
Sponsored by the European Science Foundation, EUROTYP involved about a hundred linguists over five
years (1990–1994), and its report on Tense and Aspect runs over 800 pages.
20
Another advantage is that weather forecasts are likely to reliably be restricted to prediction-based FTR mark-
ers, since weather forecasters do not generally believe they can affect the weather. This restriction comes with the
disadvantage that for many languages, prediction-based FTR is a small share of overall FTR strategies. However,
focusing on a consistent source of future-time predictions eliminates the worry that the relative proportions of FTR
strategies represented online may vary by language. In addition, using prediction-based FTR as a proxy for general
FTR tendencies is supported by the Thieroff (2000) observation that (at least in the EUROTYP data), the tendency
to mark FTR in prediction-based contexts maps more generally onto the obligatory FTR marking.
21
In some languages (Arabic, for example), a sentence with multiple verbs will often mark only the first as
future-regarding. Grammatical differences across languages like these produce variation between verb and sentence
ratios.
22
While the set of languages I can code this way is limited to those which are well represented on the searchable
Internet (39 as of the writing of this paper), it is extensive enough that both the OECD and SHARE results I report
can be run using either ratio instead of the binary strong-vs-weak FTR criteria. Both ratios produce results that are
nearly identical to the results I report, both quantitatively and statistically. Please see online Appendix Tables 1, 2,
and 3 for the results of these regressions.
VOL. 103 NO. 2 chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior 701
My first set of regressions are run on individuals in the World Values Survey
(WVS), a global survey of world cultures and values (World Values Survey 2009).
Although five waves of the WVS are available, I study only the last three, which ran
from 1994 to 2007. In these (but not earlier) waves, participants were asked what
language they normally speak at home, which I use as a proxy for the language most
likely to structure their thought. This allows me to study individuals across a set of
76 countries for which language data are available. For my purposes, this sample
has the nice feature that not only permits a broad set of countries with which to do
cross-country comparisons, it also includes a number of countries with sufficient
within-country linguistic diversity to permit within-country comparisons.
I estimate fixed-effect logit models of an individual’s propensity to save (versus
not save) in the current year, regressed on the FTR strength of that individual’s
language and a rich set of fixed-effects for country and individual characteristics.23
These fixed effects control for a person’s: country of residence, income decile within
that country, marital status (with six different classifications), sex, education (with
eight different classifications), age (in ten-year bins), number of children, survey
wave, and religion (from a set of 74) all interacted (for a total of 1.4 billion catego-
ries). Effectively, this analysis matches an individual with others who are identical
on every dimension listed above, but who speak a different language. It then asks
within these groups of otherwise identical individuals, do those who speak strong-
FTR languages behave differently than those who speak weak-FTR languages? In
addition, immigrants are excluded from this analysis so as to avoid conflating dif-
ferences in a household’s primary language with differences between natives and
immigrants.
The WVS also allows me to study the interaction between the effect of language
on savings behavior, and several beliefs and values questions asked of participants.
This allows me to examine to what degree the measured effect of language on sav-
ings behavior is attenuated by such things as how much a person reports trusting
other people, or how much they report that saving is an important cultural value. To
a limited extent, this allows me to investigate whether language acts as a marker of
deep cultural values that drive savings, or whether language itself has a direct effect
on savings behavior.
The WVS focusses on current savings behavior and beliefs. The second dataset
I analyze is the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE),
which is a panel survey that measures the socioeconomic status and health of retired
households in 13 European countries (Börsch-Supan and Jürges 2005). This allows
me to complement my earlier analysis of the WVS with an analysis of past savings
behavior (as reflected in accumulated wealth).
23
I use Chamberlain’s (1980) fixed-effect (or conditional) logit model to estimate these regressions, since I have
very few observations within each group defined by my fixed effects. The Chamberlain model solves the resulting
incidental-parameters problem.
702 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
Using the SHARE, I estimate several OLS models of total net household retire-
ment assets regressed on a household’s language.24 The SHARE attempts a compre-
hensive measure of all assets a household has, including income, private and public
benefit payments, and all forms of assets (stocks, bonds, housing, etc.) The richest
of these regressions includes fixed effects for a household’s: country of residence
(13), income decile within that country, marital status (with six different classifica-
tions), sex, education (with eight different classifications), age, number of children,
and survey wave (2004 and 2006), all interacted for a total of 2.7 million categories.
Like my regressions in the WVS, my analysis of the SHARE allows me to control for
many confounds by focusing on the effects of within-country language variation.
In addition to retirement assets, the SHARE also collects data on health behav-
iors such as smoking and exercise, as well as multiple measures of long-run phys-
ical-health: body-mass-index, walking speed (as measured by a walking test), grip
strength (as measured by a dynamometer), and respiratory health (peak expira-
tory air flow). This allows me to run similar fixed-effect regressions as my savings
results, but with a broader set of future-regarding behaviors.
Complementing these results, I run similar health regressions in data from the
MEASURE DHS project, which conducts demographic and health surveys in devel-
oping countries on behalf of USAID. These surveys collect nationally representative
data on fertility, family planning, and health behaviors in a large sample of develop-
ing countries. Together, these results allow me to investigate whether the savings
behavior results I study extend to health behaviors such as exercise, smoking, family
planning, and condom use, both in developed and developing countries.
24
Unfortunately, the SHARE does not record what language households speak at home. Instead, I exploit the
fact that the survey instrument is offered in multiple languages; households can choose to take the survey in any of
the national languages of their country. I use this choice as a proxy for their primary language.
25
I include the Russian Federation in this analysis because, as of the writing of this paper, they were in the pro-
cess of joining the OECD, and were included in the harmonized OECD data.
VOL. 103 NO. 2 chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior 703
IV. Results
The results that follow use data from five main sources of data: the WVS, the
WDI, the SHARE, the DHS, and the OECD. Please see Appendix A for a detailed
description of each dataset, as well methodologies, definitions, means, and standard
deviations of all variables of interest.
exp(zit)
(9) Pr (saveit) = _
,
1 + exp(zit)
where
zit = β 0 + β 1 StrongFTR + β 2 Xit + β 3 Xt + β 4 F ex
it + β 5 F t .
c
26
These relative language shares were obtained for each country from their national census taken closest to the
year 2000.
27
See Appendix A for the exact wording of this and other questions in the WVS.
704 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
Saved
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
Strong FTR 0.460 0.441 0.443 0.449 0.456 0.471
[0.069]*** [0.071]*** [0.072]*** [0.073]*** [0.074]*** [0.073]***
French legal origin† 0.473 0.579 0.595 0.579 0.59
[0.065]*** [0.110]*** [0.129]** [0.128]** [0.128]**
German legal origin† 0.406 0.441 0.451 0.435 0.449
[0.084]*** [0.096]*** [0.134]*** [0.147]** [0.150]**
Scandinavian legal origin† 0.616 0.665 0.670 0.643 0.683
[0.192] [0.215] [0.324] [0.355] [0.371]
log per capita GDP† 1.164 1.154 1.171 1.169 1.168
[0.057]*** [0.057]*** [0.093]** [0.098] [0.100]
PCGDPt−1 / PCGDP †t 0.597 0.588 0.600 0.580
[0.672] [0.676] [0.675] [0.655]
Unemployed 0.532 0.529 0.529 0.529
[0.035]*** [0.038]*** [0.036]*** [0.036]***
Real interest rate† 0.996 0.997 0.996 0.997
[0.003] [0.003] [0.003] [0.003]
WDI legal-rights index† 1.045 1.044 1.042 1.038
[0.035] [0.044] [0.048] [0.049]
Trust 1.229 1.229
[0.041]*** [0.041]***
Family is important 0.886 0.886
[0.024]*** [0.024]***
Trust† 0.906 0.953
(country average) [0.493] [0.535]
Family is important† 1.602 1.629
(country average) [1.500] [1.557]
Language share 0.911
[0.149]
FTR share 0.775
[0.339]
Fixed effects:
Age × sex Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Continent No No No Yes Yes Yes
Notes: Regressions are logistic regressions with coefficients reported as odds ratios. Immigrants are excluded from
all regressions. Variables with a (†) following their name vary only at the country level. Robust standard errors are
reported in brackets; all regressions are clustered at the country level.
*** Significant at the 1 percent level.
** Significant at the 5 percent level.
Shleifer (2008) use to study the effect of legal origins. Regression 3 adds a richer
set of controls than typically included in those regressions, including the growth
rate of PCGDP, unemployment, real interest rates, and the WDI legal-rights index.
Regression 4 goes further, adding continent fixed effects. If anything, the inclusion
of these controls increases the measured effect of language.
Regression 5 adds the two most studied variables in the large literature on social
capital as additional controls, both at the household level, and as their country-
level averages. “ Trust” measures whether an individual thinks “most people can be
trusted.” This measure has a large and marginally significant effect on the propensity
of an individual to save; individuals who think others are generally trustworthy are
on average 23 percent more likely to have saved this year. “Family” measures how
VOL. 103 NO. 2 chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior 705
important a respondent says that family is to them (with 1 being “very” and 4 being
“not at all”.) People who report valuing family save significantly more than those
who do not. Both of these effects appear to be largely independent of the effect of
language.
Regression 6 adds controls for the share of a country which speaks a household’s
language, and what share speak a language with the same FTR level. These results
demonstrate that the effect of language is not driven by speaking either minor-
ity languages or FTR structures. Table 2 presents the coefficient on strong-FTR
when this final regression (regression 6) is run separately by continent and level of
development.
These regressions display coefficients less than one in every major region of the
world and at every level of PCGDP, consistent with my main findings. Estimates
from these first sets of regressions suggest that a language’s FTR is an important
predictor of savings behavior. This effect is large (larger than that of other widely-
studied variables), does not attenuate despite the inclusion of an aggressive set of
controls, and appears to hold across both geographical regions and levels of devel-
opment. Nevertheless, these regressions are fundamentally cross-country, and may
omit important differences between countries not captured by standard controls.
To attempt to account for this possibility, my next set of regressions include
both country fixed effects and comprehensive household-level controls, compar-
ing demographically similar households born and living in the same country. These
within-country regressions rely on the fact that many countries are multilingual, and
contain sets of extremely similar native families who live in close geographic prox-
imity, but who speak different languages.
These regressions are carried out using fixed-effect (or conditional) logistic anal-
ysis, where the dependant variable saveitis an individual reporting having saved in
net this year.28 I estimate the equation
exp(zit)
(10) Pr ( saveit) = _
,
1 + exp(zit)
where
zit = β1 StrongFTR + β2 Xit + β3 F ex
it ×
F en
it ×
F ct .
In equation (10), the F variables are sets of fixed effects that are jointly interacted
to form groups for the basis of analysis: the conditional-likelihood function is cal-
culated relative to these groups. That is, individuals are compared only with others
who are identical on every F variable. F it is a set of fixed effects that can be taken
ex
as exogenous, these are non-choice variables such as age and sex. F en it is a set of
fixed effects that are likely endogenous to an individual’s discount rate, such as
income, education, and family structure. F ct is a set of country-wave fixed effects. In
using these extensive fixed effects to compare like families, this estimation strategy
mirrors that of Poterba, Venti, and Wise (1995) and the international comparisons
28
See Chamberlain (1980) for details on conditional-logistic analysis, and Appendix A for the exact wording of
this and other questions in the WVS.
706 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
Strong FTR
Regression restricted by continent: Coefficient SE Observations
Africa 0.596 [0.095]*** 28,262
Asia 0.519 [0.104]*** 30,198
Europe 0.581 [0.135]** 45,502
Americas 0.713 [0.148] 26,854
Notes: Coefficients (reported as odds ratios) are from logistic regressions with the same specification as regression
6 in Table 1, but restricted by continent or level of per capita GDP. Robust standard errors are reported in brackets;
all regressions are clustered at the country level.
*** Significant at the 1 percent level.
** Significant at the 5 percent level.
29
See Appendix A for the full wording of these questions in the WVS.
VOL. 103 NO. 2 chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior 707
Saved
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
Strong FTR 0.460 0.718 0.722 0.700 0.691 0.693
[0.069]*** [0.113]** [0.115]** [0.103]** [0.090]*** [0.092]***
Unemployed 0.677 0.694 0.688 0.689
[0.031]*** [0.044]*** [0.044]*** [0.044]***
Trust 1.083 1.084
[0.045] [0.045]
Family is important 0.952 0.953
[0.057] [0.057]
Saving is important 1.111
(to teach children) [0.044]***
Fixed effects:
Age × sex Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Country × wave No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Income × edu No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Married × num chil No No No Yes Yes Yes
All FEs interacted Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Notes: Regressions are fixed-effect (or conditional) logistic regressions with coefficients reported as odds ratios.
Immigrants are excluded from all regressions. Robust standard errors are reported in brackets; all regressions are
clustered at the country level.
*** Significant at the 1 percent level.
** Significant at the 5 percent level.
Strong FTR
Country Weak-FTR languages Percent Strong-FTR languages Percent Coef. SE N
Burkina Faso Dyula 16 French, Fula, Moore 84 0.687 [0.386] 137
Estonia Estonian 78 Russian 22 0.000 [0.000] 31
Ethiopia Amharic, Oromo, Sidamo 78 Chaha, Gamo, Tigrinya 22 0.837 [0.366] 208
Malaysia Malay, Mandarin 87 English, Tamil 13 0.745 [0.232] 449
Nigeria Yoruba 30 English, Hausa, Igbo 70 0.758 [0.354] 121
Singapore Malay, Mandarin 63 English, Tamil 37 0.813 [0.149] 664
Switzerland German 52 French, Italian 48 0.360 [0.133]*** 171
Notes: Coefficients (reported as odds ratios) are from fixed-effect (or conditional) logistic regressions with the
same specification as regression 6 in Table 3, but restricted to individual countries with significant within-country
variation in FTR strength. Listed languages are the most common weak- and strong-FTR languages in that country;
percents are the share of that country’s WVS sample that speak weak- and strong-FTR languages. Immigrants are
excluded from all regressions.
*** Significant at the 1 percent level.
** Significant at the 5 percent level.
across individuals the belief that saving is an important value is almost completely
uncorrelated with the FTR of their language (corr = −0.07).
Parameter estimates from this first set of regressions indicate that a language’s
FTR is an important predictor of savings behavior. This effect is both large (larger
than that of other widely-studied variables) and survives an extremely aggressive
set of controls. Interestingly, this correlation is statistically independent of what was
708 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
Saved
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
Strong FTR 0.857 0.676 0.669 0.537 0.539
[0.297] [0.096]*** [0.098]*** [0.111]*** [0.111]***
Unemployed 0.693 0.632 0.689 0.750 0.749
[0.046]*** [0.156] [0.044]*** [0.068]*** [0.067]***
Trust 1.072 1.277 1.084 1.066 1.067
[0.047] [0.139]** [0.045] [0.050] [0.050]
Family is important 0.963 0.792 0.953 0.991 0.990
[0.060] [0.128] [0.057] [0.069] [0.069]
Saving is important 1.124 0.978 1.110 1.056
(to teach children) [0.047]*** [0.080] [0.044]*** [0.060]
Language share 0.769 0.700 0.699
[0.120] [0.129] [0.129]
FTR share 1.016 0.475 0.469
[0.184] [0.190] [0.188]
Full set of FEs
from reg 5 in Table 3 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Religion FEs No No No Yes Yes
All FEs interacted Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Country’s FTR variation < 5% (69) > 5% (7) All All All
Notes: Regressions are fixed-effect (or conditional) logistic regressions with coefficients reported as odds ratios.
Immigrants are excluded from all regressions. Robust standard errors are reported in brackets; all regressions are
clustered at the country level.
*** Significant at the 1 percent level.
** Significant at the 5 percent level.
designed to be a good marker of saving and thrift as a cultural value. This suggests
that the channel through which language affects the propensity to save is largely
independent of the saving as a self-reported value. Later, I will discuss what this
non-attenuation result suggests about the causal link between language and savings
behavior.
Next, I look at which countries in the WVS have numerous native speakers of
both weak- and strong-FTR languages. Figure 1 shows the percent of households
who reported savings for countries in the WVS, organized by what percent of the
country’s survey respondents report speaking a strong-FTR language at home.
As Figure 1 shows, the between-country relationship between savings and lan-
guage is both clear and highly significant in the WVS. However, the vast majority
of countries (69 of 76) have basically no intra-country variation in FTR strength.
This is because in most countries one language dominates, and in many multilingual
countries, those languages share a common FTR structure. For example, though
Canada has both English and French speaking populations, French and English are
both strong-FTR languages.
In 7 of 76 WVS countries however, both weak- and strong-FTR speakers are a sig-
nificant share of natives. These seven countries provide the majority of identification
for my within-country regressions. Table 4 enumerates these countries, and reports
the coefficient on Strong FTR when regression 6 from Table 3 is estimated in that
VOL. 103 NO. 2 chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior 709
60
Switzerland
50
Percent of households saving
Malaysia
Singapore
40
Estonia Nigeria
30
Burkina Faso
10 countries have almost
no strong-FTR speakers
20
Coef: –0.1558
T = –4.19 59 countries have almost
Ethiopia P < 0.001 no weak-FTR speakers
10
0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Share of households speaking a strong-FTR language (percent)
Notes: Figure 1 plots the least-squares regression of the percent of a country which reports saving on the percent of
that country which speaks a strong-FTR language at home. The large number of countries with extreme strong-FTR
percentages (< 5 percent and > 95 percent), are summarized by their means and standard errors.
country. I also report the percents of each country’s sample that speak strong- and
weak-FTR languages, the most common languages they speak, and the sample size
of each country-specific regression.
Remember that these coefficients represent the odds ratio of savings, for strong-
over weak-FTR families. Though small samples reduce statistical significance,
consistent with my overall effect, all 7 regressions display coefficients less than 1,
(strong-FTR families save less often than their weak-FTR counterparts). The coeffi-
cient in Estonia is 0 because in the sample of matched Estonian families, no Russian
speakers reported saving. Other than this outlier, (which is driven by that regres-
sion’s small sample size) the estimated effect is remarkably stable across this set of
countries, which span multiple continents, regions, and sets of languages.
To confirm this and to explore the robustness of my initial results to additional
controls, I estimate an additional set of regressions summarized in Table 5. First, I
estimate the regression with a full set of controls (regression 6 in Table 3) separately
in the 69 countries with little, and the 7 countries with sizable within-country FTR
variation (columns 1 and 2 in Table 5, respectively). I also examine whether these
results are explained by the share of a country speaking a language or languages of a
particular FTR level. Finally, I add fixed-effects for self-reported religious denomi-
nation (74 in total), interacted with all of my previous fixed effects.
Regressions 1 and 2 confirm that the majority of the identification for my within-
country regressions come from the seven countries enumerated in Table 4. The coef-
ficient of 0.676 in regression 2 is statistically indistinguishable from the coefficient
of 0.691 I measure when that regression is run on the whole sample.
Returning to the whole sample: as an additional control, regressions 3, 4, and 5
add controls for the share of a country that speaks a household’s language, and what
share speak a language with the same FTR level. Neither of these attenuate the effect
710 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
IHS( _ DI )
RA
Notes: Regressions are fixed-effect OLS regressions where the dependent variable is the inverse-hyperbolic sine of
net household retirement assets divided by average national disposable income. Immigrant households are excluded
from all regressions. Robust standard errors are reported in brackets; all regressions are clustered at the country
level except regression 5, which is clustered at the household level.
*** Significant at the 1 percent level.
** Significant at the 5 percent level.
If individuals who speak strong-FTR languages save less in any given year, then
we would expect them to accumulate less savings over time. My next set of regres-
sions examines the cumulative retirement assets of individuals in the retired house-
holds in the SHARE.
Table 6 summarizes regressions that estimate the equation
( )
rait
(11) IHS _
= α + β1 StrongFTR + β2(F ex
it ×
F en
it ×
F ct ) + εit,
incct
where
minus any debt. In order to make this comparable across families living in different
countries, I divide raitby incct, that country’s average disposable income.30 Finally,
in order to assure that these regressions are not being driven by outliers, I apply
IHS(x), an inverse-hyperbolic-sine transformation. Except for small values of x,
this transformation approximately equals log(2x), or log(2) + log(x), and so coef-
ficients can be interpreted in exactly the same way as with a standard log transfor-
mation. Unlike the log transformation though, IHS(x) is defined for both zero and
negative values of x, which are common in wealth data.31
Unfortunately, unlike the WVS, the SHARE does not ask households what lan-
guage they speak at home. Therefore, the main variable of interest Strong FTR is
coded using the language that the head of household asked to take the survey in (the
SHARE attempts to offer the survey in any of a country’s national languages).
Mirroring my earlier regressions in the WVS, the F variables are sets of fixed
effects that are jointly interacted to form groups similar to those in my analysis of
the WVS. That is, households are compared only with others who are identical on
every F variable, but who asked to take the survey in a different language. Empirical
estimates of equation (11) are presented in Table 6; all coefficients can be inter-
preted as percent changes in retirement savings.32
Regressions 1 through 5 show my predicted effect; retired households that speak
strong-FTR languages have around 39 percent less by the time they retire. These
regressions are identified by the fact that Belgium has large Flemish (weak-FTR)
and French (strong-FTR) speaking populations, and Switzerland has large German
(weak-FTR), and French, Italian, and Romansh (strong-FTR) speaking populations.
Comparing regressions 4 and 5, we see that the differences overall effect appear to
be roughly the same size as the differences between different FTR groups within
Belgium and Switzerland.
Table 7 summarizes regressions that increase the level of spatial control by includ-
ing fixed effects for intra-country regions. This allows us to examine whether lan-
guage may be proxying (even within country) for unobserved differences between
regions, counties or even cities. If for example, families tend to segregate across
regions by language, then I may be attributing institutional differences between
regions to language.
Comparing regressions 1 and 2 (in Belgium) and regressions 3 and 4 (in
Switzerland) shows that the addition of finer spatial controls (in the form of 11
Belgian and 7 Swiss region dummies) do not appear to attenuate the effect of lan-
guage on retirement savings. For example, Brussels has both a large Dutch speaking
(weak-FTR) and a large French speaking (strong-FTR) population. Regressions 5
and 6 show that even when comparing demographically similar families living in
Brussels, language appears to have a strong effect on retirement savings. Together,
30
Average disposable income is per head, with PPP and in 2005 Euros, as collected by the OECD.
31
I am indebted to Frances Woolley, who suggested I use the inverse-hyperbolic-sine transformation, and pointed
me to her work on the transformation and its use with wealth data. See Woolley (2011) and Burbidge, Magee, and
Robb (1988) for a discussion of the relative advantages of various transformations. All of the regressions I report
using this transformation provide qualitatively and statistically similar results when run without any transformation,
either as a ratio to disposable income or simply in levels.
32
Details on variable construction: Age is coded in ten-year bins, Income is coded as an intra-country decile,
and Education falls within one of eight categories provided in the SHARE. For more details on the construction of
variables and the measuring of household net-worth in the SHARE, see Börsch-Supan and Jürges (2005).
712 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
IHS( _ DI )
RA
Notes: Regressions are fixed-effect OLS regressions where the dependent variable is net household retirement
assets divided by average national disposable income, with a inverse-hyperbolic-sine transformation. Immigrant
households are excluded from all regressions. Robust standard errors are reported in brackets; all regressions are
clustered at the household level.
*** Significant at the 1 percent level.
** Significant at the 5 percent level.
these regressions suggest that the language effects I find are not due to spatial differ-
ences, at least not at the level that can be measured in the SHARE.
In addition to measuring household wealth, the SHARE also asks about health
behaviors and records several measures of physical health. If languages affect their
speakers’ intertemporal beliefs, this would also affect health behavior and long-run
health. More specifically, if obligatory FTR reduces the psychological importance
of the future, we would predict that it would lead to more smoking, less exercise,
and worse long-run health.
To investigate this, Table 8 summarizes regressions investigating the effect of
FTR on health variables found in the SHARE. Some of these measures are binary,
such as ever having smoked heavily, remaining physically active, and being medi-
cally obese. For these regressions I estimate fixed-effect logit model similar to equa-
tion (10). The other measures I examine, walking speed, grip strength, and peak
expiratory flow, are commonly studied measures of long-run health. These measure
the speed at which a person comfortably walks, the maximum amount of force they
can apply while squeezing a dynometer, and their maximum exhalatory air flow
(lung strength). For these regressions I estimate fixed-effect OLS regressions.
Regression 1 indicates that a strongly grammaticalized FTR leads to a 24 percent
higher probability of having ever smoked (daily for a year or more). This is con-
sistent with my findings on savings if the decision to smoke trades off immediate
benefits versus future health costs. Similarly, regression 2 indicates that a strong-
FTR language leads to a 29 percent lower probability of being physically active.
Regressions 3, 4, 5, and 6 examine the effect of strong-FTR on long-run measures
VOL. 103 NO. 2 chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior 713
Smoked Phys. act. Obesity Walk sp. Grip str. Peak flow
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
Strong FTR 1.241 0.709 1.131 −0.028 −0.899 −16.083
[0.042]*** [0.025]*** [0.007]*** [0.101] [0.049]*** [2.806]***
Full set of FEs
from reg 4 Table 6 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
All FEs interacted Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Notes: Regressions 1, 2, and 3 are fixed-effect (or conditional) logistic regressions with coefficients reported as
odds ratios. The dependent variables are: having smoked daily for a year or more, engaging in regular physical
activity, and medically obese. Regressions 4, 5, and 6 are fixed-effect OLS regressions for measures of old-age
health; walking speed (m/sec), grip strength (kg), and peak expiratory flow(L/min). Immigrants are excluded from
all regressions. Robust standard errors are reported in brackets; all regressions are clustered at the country level.
*** Significant at the 1 percent level.
** Significant at the 5 percent level.
The detailed health measures found in the SHARE allow me to investigate both
health behaviors, and long-run markers of health. These comparisons however, are
limited to retired citizens of developed Western-European countries, and in the pres-
ence of country fixed effects are identified almost entirely by retired households
from Belgium and Switzerland.
To investigate whether these results generalize, I run similar health regressions
in data from the MEASURE DHS project. Of the countries covered by the DHS,
four countries contain significant (>5 percent) native within-country FTR variation.
These countries are Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia,
and Nigeria.33 I use the DHS surveys for these countries in logistic health regres-
sions similar to those run in the SHARE. Table 9 reports the results of these regres-
sions on smoking, obesity, contraception, and condom use. If speaking a strong-FTR
language reduces a person’s concern for the future, we should expect it to increase
smoking and obesity, and decrease family planning and safe-sex behavior.
Regressions 1 through 6 are consistent with my general hypothesis, and quantita-
tively similar to the results I obtain in the SHARE. Speaking a strong-FTR language
is associated with a 20 percent greater likelihood of smoking, and a 17 percent
33
In order to match as closely as possible the health regressions I run in the SHARE, I use the DHS survey that
falls between 2004 and 2006 for each country, with two changes in specification. Age in the DHS data comes coded
in five-year bins, and I maintain that greater level of specificity than I used in the SHARE (ten-year bins). Also, I
include fixed effects for self-reported religion, which was not measured in the SHARE (but is in the WVS, and was
included in those regressions).
714 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
Notes: Regressions are fixed-effect (or conditional) logistic regressions with coefficients reported as odds ratios.
The dependent variables are currently smokes, being medically obese, uses any form of contraception, and used a
condom during last intercourse. Robust standard errors are reported in brackets.
*** Significant at the 1 percent level.
** Significant at the 5 percent level.
34
This prediction does not immediately follow from theory, however. Samuelson (1937) showed that when the
duration of a potential project is fixed, the value of that project may not be even weakly decreasing in the interest
rate. Arrow and Levhari (1969) established that if an agent controls when a project terminates, then in deterministic
settings the natural monotonic relationship must hold; the value of investment in projects must be monotonically
decreasing in the interest rate. In Hicks’ (1973) book Capital and Time, this is referred to as the Fundamental
Theorem of Capital. Under the conditions for which this relationship holds then, it is natural to predict that countries
with strong-FTR languages will, on average, save less.
VOL. 103 NO. 2 chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior 715
45
On average, countries which speak strong-FTR
Average total savings rate (percent GDP)
35
Light-bar countries speak
weak-FTR languages
30
Dark-bar countries speak
strong-FTR languages
25
20
15
10
H pa c
rla ile
Tu ly
un in
te gd l
ep n
Fr key
er nd
Au ve ia
el e
or and
e o
Po and
Sl ust d
e
ep ia
itz ela y
en um
G eal a
R ton n
U Ki Isra l
s nia
ew a ry
D lgi ia
M ark
Ita y
ch Ja nd
nl s
Fe K urg
r a
m d
re s
et Cblic
St m
or n
ni n e
ga
S li
Sw Ir wa
an
Fi nd
G ate
R pa
Ic nc
Sw xic
A an
ec
Z nad
ak Es de
de ore
er an
N atio
o r
Be tral
N C ga
d o
ub
he h
la
tu
m
an th o
r
a
l
e
si ou b
us S xem
d
Lu
te
ov
ze
ni
Sl
C
U
R
Notes: Figure 2 shows average total savings rates, accounting for both private and government consumption. Both
Switzerland and Belgium have significant within-country FTR variation; for simplicity they are shaded according
to their majority-FTR status. Difference in means are computed using a OLS regression where observations are
clustered at the country level.
regressions closely follow Barro and McDonald (1979), who run similar regressions
on the same OECD national savings data that we investigate here. The basic func-
tional form of these regressions is
(12) _
(
Y − C
Y
it
)
= α0 + α1(StrongFTR)i + α2 _
1
Y it ( )
+ α3 _( )
t−1
Y
Yt it
+ α4(CAGR)i + εit,
where annual observations for each country in the OECD are indexed by coun-
try i = 1, … , 35 and year t = 1970, … , 2009.35 Most importantly: C is total con-
sumption (including government expenditure) while Y is GDP, CAGR is the average
growth rate of the country from 1993 to 2009 (the earliest date for which data is
available for all countries), and StrongFTR is weighted by the percent of the coun-
try’s population reports speaking each of their major languages.36
This form of this savings equation is a simple linear relation motivated by the
Life-Cycle Hypothesis (LCH) of savings (see Modigliani 1986 for a review of the
LCH). Notice that as equation (12) is written, all terms in the savings equation
except (1/Y )itimply that a savings function that is homogeneous of degree 0, which
35
Details on the construction of each variable can be found in Appendix A.
36
Multilingual countries’ FTR values need to be weighted by the shares of their populations speaking each
language. I used the Ethnologue database to do this, see Lewis (2009) for details.
716 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
GDSRt
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
Strong FTR −5.272 −5.212 −5.245 −6.397 −5.821 −5.924
[1.798]*** [1.769]*** [1.948]** [1.774]*** [2.378]** [2.457]**
PCGDPt−1 /PCGDPt −32.504 −35.035 −45.985 −41.852 −41.285 −32.396
[7.908]*** [8.930]*** [14.742]*** [13.215]*** [12.065]*** [10.819]***
CAGR −0.045 −0.009 0.141 0.154 0.169 0.159
[0.128] [0.169] [0.284] [0.265] [0.255] [0.228]
Unemploymentt(percent) −0.411 −0.367 −0.226 −0.190 −0.170 −0.171
[0.141]*** [0.133]*** [0.142] [0.130] [0.125] [0.118]
Oldt (percent) −1.342 −1.382 −1.386 −1.240 −1.100 −1.165
[0.284]*** [0.298]*** [0.318]*** [0.319]*** [0.283]*** [0.299]***
Youngt(percent) −0.711 −0.663 −0.618 −0.367 −0.205 −0.155
[0.162]*** [0.184]*** [0.239]** [0.212] [0.302] [0.351]
1/PCGDPt −28.119 −66.266 −109.761 −130.260 −133.831
[49.798] [65.211] [57.808] [71.601] [68.227]
Soc Sect(percent GDP/old) −1.942 −1.909 −1.622 −5.457
[2.252] [2.040] [2.153] [3.395]
Protestant −4.102 −4.229 −5.501
[1.427]*** [1.850]** [1.196]***
French legal origin −0.424 0.358
[2.425] [3.401]
German legal origin 1.542 2.197
[3.316] [4.283]
Scandanavian legal origin 0.395 0.503
[3.508] [3.343]
Distance from equator 1.371
[3.106]
Notes: Regressions are OLS regressions where the dependent variable is a country’s gross domestic savings rate
in year t. Observations are for OECD countries from 1970 to 2009. Protestant is a binary variable that measures if
the country is majority protestant or not. Robust standard errors are reported in brackets and clustered at the coun-
try level.
*** Significant at the 1 percent level.
** Significant at the 5 percent level.
is to say that the savings rate is independent of the level or unit of income. This
assumption has theoretical support in the LCH model, and allows for a specification
in which units of measurement do not need to be comparable across countries. It
may be violated if, as Feldstein (1980) points out, higher incomes lead to a increase
in the share of life spent in retirement. This leads to the presence of the 1/Yitterm,
which can test for such effects as measured by a positive α 2. Essentially this term
allows the marginal propensity to consume out of income to differ by the level of
development of a country. In addition, OECD data allows for the inclusion of a num-
ber of important demographic controls:
α5(Unemployment)it + α6(Old)it + α7(Young)it + α8(SocSec)it .
VOL. 103 NO. 2 chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior 717
These control for the unemployment rate, the fraction of the population that are over
65, the fraction under 15, and the per capita fraction of GDP spent on social security
payments (defined as percent GDP spent on disability, old age, and survivors ben-
efits divided by the fraction of the population that are over 65).
Another possible concern with cross-country regressions may be that the FTR
strength of countries is spatially correlated. In Western Europe for example, most
strong-FTR countries are in the northern half of the continent. This leads to the
possibility that (at least in Western Europe), the effects I attribute to strong-FTR
could actually be due to correlated spatial factors (like climate or distance from
Mediterranean trade routes) Similar stories might also invalidate my results on other
continents. The inclusion of continent fixed effects and a country’s Latitude allow
me to investigate whether effects like these are biasing my results.
Empirical estimates of equation (12) are presented in Table 10.
Regression 1 estimates a version of equation (12) that is fully homogeneous of
degree 0, while regressions 2 through 6 add 1/PCGDPt , which allows savings rates
to vary with the size of the economy. These regressions suggest that countries with
a strong-FTR language save on average around five percentage points less per year
than do countries with a weak-FTR language, a result consistent with my earlier
results on household savings and health measures. Regressions 5 and 6 add con-
trols commonly found in the literature on economic growth: Protestantism and a
country’s legal origin.37 Regression 6 adds two measures to help control for spatial
correlation, continent fixed effects, and the distance from a country’s capital to the
equator in thousands of miles. Overall, the measured effect of FTR on national sav-
ings rates is stable to the inclusion of these controls. Weak-FTR countries appear
to save on average 6 percent more of their GDP per year than their strong-FTR
counterparts.
37
A large literature has argued that common-law countries provide stronger protection of outside investors from
expropriation by corporate insiders, and that this and other features of a legal system are largely determined by a
country’s legal origin; see La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, and Shleifer (2008) for an excellent survey.
718 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
GDSRt
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
Strong FTR −5.212 −4.194 −5.458 −5.142 −6.975
[1.769]*** [1.750]** [1.805]*** [2.043]** [2.667]**
PCGDPt−1/PCGDPt −35.035 −46.258 −64.147 −49.460 −18.060
[8.930]*** [12.536]*** [15.494]*** [19.760]** [8.391]**
CAGR −0.009 0.397 0.313 0.121 −0.056
[0.169] [0.571] [0.329] [0.371] [0.158]
Unemploymentt(percent) −0.367 −0.544 −0.360 −0.229 −0.321
[0.133]*** [0.307] [0.189] [0.192] [0.153]**
Oldt (percent) −1.382 −1.298 −1.178 −1.803 −2.019
[0.298]*** [0.552]** [0.321]*** [0.382]*** [0.513]***
Youngt(percent) −0.663 −0.624 −0.213 −0.810 −1.237
[0.184]*** [0.464] [0.320] [0.257]*** [0.230]***
1/PCGDPt −28.119 112.425 −23.892 −49.676 −66.561
[49.798] [78.480] [29.367] [53.792] [85.171]
Notes: Regressions are OLS regressions where the dependent variable is a country’s gross domestic savings rates in
year t. Robust standard errors are reported in brackets and clustered at the country level.
*** Significant at the 1 percent level.
** Significant at the 5 percent level.
these cross-country regressions survive the types of culture and values controls that
are present in the WVS. Table 12 reports the results of these regressions.
The results of these regressions suggest that the national savings results I find
are not limited to the developed nations of the OECD, and also survive the cultural
controls that are found in the WVS. Overall, if anything the effect of language on
national savings appears stronger (in percentage points) among developing than
developed nations, and are not significantly attenuated by the inclusion of culture
and values controls.
V. Discussion
The idea that language can impact the way people think and act has a rich history
in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. Saussure, the founder of both structural
linguistics and semiotics, characterized reality as an unstructured phenomena that
is discretized and organized by language, writing: “if words stood for pre-existing
entities they would all have exact equivalents in meaning from one language to the
next, but this is not true” (Saussure 1916). In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
Wittgenstein (1922) formulates a theory of language as the means by which people
both picture and reason about reality, famously concluding: “Wovon man nich spre-
chen kann, darüber muss man schweigen” (Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one
VOL. 103 NO. 2 chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior 719
GDSRt
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
Strong FTR −13.848 −15.545 −12.253 −11.328 −8.442 −11.002
[3.303]*** [4.814]*** [3.337]*** [3.320]*** [2.980]*** [3.611]***
PCGDPt−1/PCGDPt 47.570 19.905 15.108 15.616 13.488 11.032
[35.330] [28.120] [25.197] [23.366] [21.735] [19.177]
Oldt (percent) −2.363 −1.718 −1.916 −2.112 −1.144 −1.064
[0.685]*** [0.839]** [0.730]** [0.687]*** [0.774] [1.312]
Youngt(percent) −1.274 −0.736 −0.813 −0.891 −0.617 −0.523
[0.409]*** [0.498] [0.501] [0.512] [0.475] [0.693]
French legal origin −7.676 −3.302 −7.578 −4.191 −2.189
[2.843]*** [2.828] [4.887] [4.831] [6.080]
German legal origin −9.937 −6.735 −11.716 −6.883 −6.450
[6.790] [4.980] [4.828]** [5.204] [8.180]
Scandanavian legal origin −7.430 −3.196 −6.432 1.139 omitted
[7.248] [5.326] [5.355] [5.580]
1/PCGDPt −4.455 −4.819 −5.102 −5.477 −4.811
[1.726]** [1.781]*** [1.766]*** [1.954]*** [2.318]**
Unemploymentt(percent) −0.724 −0.587 −0.455 −0.252
[0.193]*** [0.225]** [0.207]** [0.250]
Real interest ratet −0.199 −0.219 −0.217 −0.213
[0.108] [0.092]** [0.076]*** [0.081]**
Legal rights index −0.899 −0.084 0.236
[0.999] [1.059] [1.280]
Trustt 2.947 −0.787 −5.474
[9.244] [8.738] [11.585]
Family is importantt 47.163 42.008 49.974
[15.877]*** [13.648]*** [17.618]***
Notes: Regressions are OLS regressions where the dependent variable is a country’s gross domestic savings rates in
year t. Observations are for the countries in the WVS countries over three waves, from 1994 to 2008. Robust stan-
dard errors are reported in brackets and clustered at the country level.
*** Significant at the 1 percent level.
** Significant at the 5 percent level.
must be silent). The idea that language can influence thought has become know as
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (SWH, Whorf 1956), and has generated several interest-
ing lines of research in linguistics and psychology.38 My hypothesis can be thought
of as an instance of the SWH, and is to my knowledge, the first to connect language
structure and decision making.
38
See Scholz, Pelletier, and Pullum 2011 for a review of Sapir-Whorf hypotheses.
720 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
in his seminal work Syntactic Structures, Chomsky (1957) argues that humans have
an innate set of mechanisms for learning language, and that this constrains all human
languages to conform with a “universal grammar.”
Taken in strong form, a universal grammar would largely eliminate the scope for
language to affect cognition. In The Language Instinct, Pinker (1994) argues exactly
this: that humans do not think in the language we speak in, but rather in an innate
“mentalese” which precedes natural language. He concludes that: “there is no scien-
tific evidence that languages dramatically shape their speakers’ ways of thinking”
(emphasis mine).While a rich literature since 1994 has disputed this claim, support
for the SWH remains an hotly debated topic.
39
The Académie francaise is made up of 40 members (immortels) who are elected to life terms. The Académie
is France’s official authority on the vocabulary and grammar of the French language, and publishes the Dictionnaire
de l’Académie française, the official dictionary of the French language.
VOL. 103 NO. 2 chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior 721
climate, and the ecology of animal domestication (Diamond 2005). Historian David
Landes argues that deep seated cultural factors affect the ability of societies to exploit
science, technology, and markets (Landes 1998). Finally, social scientists such as
Acemoglu, Robinson, and Shleifer have argued for the central role of institutions
in providing the right incentives for innovation and good government (Acemoglu
and Robinson 2012; La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, and Shleifer 2008). All of these
theories were developed by comparing similarly situated nations and societies that
have experienced divergent economic outcomes. While my findings are not a theory
of development, they do suggest that language structure is an important factor to
account for when making such comparisons.
VI. Conclusion
Overall, my findings are largely consistent with the hypothesis that languages with
obligatory future-time reference lead their speakers to engage in less future-oriented
behavior. On savings, the evidence is consistent on multiple levels: at an individual’s
propensity to save, to long-run effects on retirement wealth, and in national savings
rates. These findings extend to health behaviors ranging from smoking to condom
use, as well as to measures of long-run health. All of these results survive after
comparing only individuals who are identical in numerous ways and were born and
raised in the same country.
One important issue in interpreting these results is the possibility that language
is not causing but rather reflecting deeper differences that drive savings behavior.
These available data provide preliminary evidence that much of the measured effects
I find are causal, for several reasons that I have outlined in the paper. Mainly, self-
reported measures of savings as a cultural value appear to drive savings behavior,
yet are completely uncorrelated with the effect of language on savings. That is to
say, while both language and cultural values appear to drive savings behavior, these
measured effects do not appear to interact with each other in a way you would
expect if they were both markers of some common causal factor.
In addition, differences in the use of FTR do not seem to correspond to cognitive
or developmental differences in the acquisition of language. This suggests that the
effect of language that I measure occurs through a channel that is independent of
either cultural or cognitive differences between linguistic groups.
Nevertheless, the possibility that language acts only as a powerful marker of some
deeper driver of intertemporal preferences cannot be completely ruled out. This pos-
sibility is intriguing in itself, as the variation in future-time reference that identifies
my regressions is very old. In Europe for example, most Germanic and Finno-Ugric
languages have been futureless for hundreds of years. Indeed, Dahl (2000) suggests
that proto-Germanic was futureless at least 2,000 years ago.
Appendix A: Data
A. Data Statements
This paper uses data from SHARE release 2.3.1, as of July 29, 2010. SHARE data
collection in 2004–2007 was primarily funded by the European Commission through
722 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
FAMSAVED: During the past year, did your family (read out and code one
answer):
1: Save money (23 percent)
2: Just get by (51 percent)
3: Spent some savings and borrowed money (14 percent)
4: Spent savings and borrowed money (12 percent)
For the regressions in this paper, this variable is coded as 1 if the family reported
saving money, and 0 otherwise.
TRUST: Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or
that you need to be very careful in dealing with people? (Code one answer):
1: Most people can be trusted. (26 percent)
2: Need to be very careful. (74 percent)
Mean SD
WDI variables
GDSRt 18.2% 14.2%
PCGDPt(US$) $7,375 $10,080
PCGDPt−1/PCGDPt 0.967 0.043
Real interest ratet 6.28% 15.9%
Oldt 9.14% 4.87%
Youngt 26.9% 9.26%
Legal rights index (1 to 10) 5.99 2.31
WVS variables
Trust (country average) 25.9 14.9
Family (country average) 1.11 0.074
Percent of households
Saved this year 23.0
Strong FTR (language spoken at home) 85.0
Sex (male) 48.2
Unemployed 9.84
Most people can be trusted (agree) 26.2
Mean SD
Age 40.5 16.1
Age finished school 19.3 6.35
Number of children 1.95 1.85
Family importance (1 “very”– 4 “not at all”) 1.10 0.351
Language share 76.1% 31.9%
FTR share 97.4% 11.2%
system. These controls account for the fact that legal rules protecting investors
appear to vary systematically among legal traditions, with La Porta et al. (1997)
arguing that the laws of common law countries (originating in English law) are
more protective of outside investors than civil law countries (originating in Roman
law). They argue that these protections limit the extent of expropriation of outside
investors by corporate insiders, and thereby promotes financial development. In this
paper I include fixed effects for French, German, and Scandinavian legal origins,
with English legal origins as the excluded category. See La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes,
and Shleifer (2008) for a summary of this measure and the literature surrounding it.
LEGAL RIGHTS INDEX: The World Bank strength of legal rights index mea-
sures the degree to which a country’s collateral and bankruptcy laws protect the
rights of borrowers and lenders and thus facilitate lending. The index ranges
from 0 to 10, with higher scores indicating that these laws are better designed to
expand access to credit. For details, see the World Bank Doing Business Project,
(www.doingbusiness.org).
724 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
Percent of households
Smoked 47.6
Physically inactive 89.4
Obesity (BMI > 30) 17.6
Mean SD
Household net worth (€) 333,417 € 1,183,231 €
Disposable income (€) 21,354 € 3,935 €
Age (years) 65.9 10.5
Education (years) 10.7 4.42
Number of children 2.13 1.41
Walking speed (m/s) 0.692 0.373
Grip strength (kg) 34.5 12.1
Peak expiratory flow (L/min) 337 160
Percent of households
Smoke 4.83
Obesity (BMI > 30) 23.1
Use any form of contraception 24.7
Used a condom last sexual encounter 8.85
Sex (male) 29.9
Education: Primary school 22.1
Education: Secondary school 29.2
Education: Higher 6.11
Mean SD
Age (years) 29.3 10.4
Number of children 3.06 3.41
Household size 6.74 4.19
Mean SD
GDSRt 24.2% 5.90%
Strong FTR 64.6% 46.6%
PCGDPt(US$) $22,096 $9,259
PCGDPt−1/PCGDPt 0.978 0.030
CAGRt 9.69% 9.90%
Oldt 13.1% 3.48%
Youngt 20.2% 4.94%
Social Securityt 0.743 0.233
Distance from equator 3.214 0.666
F. OECD Variables
All GDP-based measures are computed using the expenditure method, with con-
stant PPPs using US dollars from the OECD base year (2000).
CAGR is the average growth rate of the country from 1993 to 2009 (the earliest
date for which data is available for all countries).
OLDt and YOUNGt are the percent of the population that are older than 65 and
younger than 15 in year t.
SOC SECtis the per capita fraction of GDP spent by a country in year t on social
security payments, divided by the fraction of the population that are over 65. These
payments include expenditures on disability, old age, and survivors benefits.
DIST FROM EQUATOR is the distance in thousands of miles between a coun-
try’s capital and the equator.
Selection of Languages to Cover.—As a first proxy for languages which are well
represented on the web, I look at the set of languages that Google allows a web
search to be restricted to, or which are covered by Google Translate (whose main
function is translating websites). I exclude languages from this list which are either
synthetic (Esperanto) or are not spoken by significant numbers of people as their
first language (Latin). I then conduct a Google search for variants of the phrase
“weather forecast,” in each of these languages, restricted to results in that language.
So for example, I conduct a Google search for the terms “wettervorhersage,” “wet-
terprognose,” and “wetterberichte,” restricted to websites in German.
40
I want to thank Yale undergraduates Jane Bang and Ryan Caro, for their invaluable research assistance in
assembling these data, and Yale linguistics doctoral candidate Nicole Palffy-Muhoray for invaluable feedback on
sensible measures of future-time reference intensity.
VOL. 103 NO. 2 chen: The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior 727
to future events (some sentences discuss past weather patterns, or general seasonal
patterns), resulted in roughly 46 sentences per language to analyze, for an average
of 58.4 verbs.
The analyses of Thieroff (2000) suggest that the tendency to mark prediction-
based FTR maps more generally onto whether “future time reference can be referred
to with unmarked form (the present).” Dahl also finds that weak-FTR corresponds
strongly with a language’s general tendency to require FTR, and suggests that
“whether FTR is overtly and obligatorily marked in prediction-based sentences can
be used as one of the major criteria for whether it is grammaticalized in a language
or not” (Dahl 2000). These analyses motivate my decision to use weak-FTR as a
proxy for the general treatment of future time in a language.
Most analyses in this paper study languages directly analyzed by the EUROTYP
Theme Group. In those regressions, weak-FTR languages are the set of languages
Dahl calls “futureless” languages and Thieroff (2000) calls “weakly-grammatical-
ized future” languages. Some regressions analyze the World-Values Survey, whose
participants speak many non-European languages not analyzed by either Dahl or
Thieroff.
To extend their characterization to this broader set, I rely on several other cross-
linguistic analyses that have studied how languages mark future time (most nota-
bly Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994; Cyffer, Ebermann, and Ziegelmeyer 2009;
Dahl 1985; Dahl and Kós-Dienes 1984; and Nurse 2008). Most importantly, several
African countries are well represented in the WVS and have several national lan-
guages. Given their potential importance for within-country identification, I code
these languages only when both a cross-linguistic study and a language specific
728 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW april 2013
reference grammar agree on a language’s FTR structure. Most important were Adu-
Amankwah (2003) for Akan; Olawsky (1999) and Lehr, Redden, and Balima (1966)
for Dagbani and Moore; Newman (2000) for Hausa; Carrell (1970), Emenanjo
(1978), Ndimele (2009), and Uwalaka (1997) for Igbo; Bentley (1887) for Kongo
and Awobuluyi (1978); and de Gaye and Beecroft (1964) for Yoruba.
I have attempted to be as conservative as possible in extending my weak-FTR
coding to languages not covered by the EUROTYP. Several rules applied, which I
will describe.
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